Sunday, December 20, 2015

DAY OF THE DEAD — A SHORT STORY

As 2015 drew to a close, Betimes Books released two new works: a Hector Lassiter novel I wrote informed by Ian Fleming's James Bond novels called DEATH IN THE FACE, and an anthology of fiction and nonfiction I edited called BORDERLAND NOIR. This never-before-seen short story bridges those two new books.

She scoops an ice cube from
her goblet, sliding it across the back of her painted neck, getting a
little fleeting focus back and simultaneously cursing Addie Garner. Addie enticed
Jenna and the others to Mexico City on this dubious, weekend whim.

Weeks back: Addie spots
something on her Twitter feed about the next James Bond film staging a one-time
only, off-season re-creation of the city’s annual Day of the Dead parade, an
event being brought off exclusively for the next 007 outing.

Addie has a formidable bank
of ricochet hotel and airline points via Daddy, a well-traveled, over-indulgent
über executive with some multi-national. Addie also has this burning yen to escape
the drudgery of their Texas campus for a long weekend. The trip, Addie makes
clear, will be mostly on her.

The ensuing, remaining math
quickly sorts itself out: Four girls—all theatre majors—one room, two beds and
some of their various folks’ leftover gifted Christmas money pooled for drinks,
inexpensive taco cart eats and maybe even a souvenir trinket or two.

In the abstract, it sounds
like a crazy blast.

But Mexico City has so far proven
a frustrating tumult with the film’s crew, thousands of extras and the world’s
press sucking up all the decent hotel rooms and other amenities.

Somewhere, sometime, Jenna
read this proverb, of sorts. She thinks of it, fingering her gifted,
more-than-meets the eye necklace:

It is better to travel hopefully, than to arrive.

That little bit of would-be,
received wisdom is proving all too accurate. She lets go of the medallion
around her neck and sighs.

They’d flown down to Mexico
City in a careless flurry of hopes and dreams.

They’d flung their unpacked bags
on the hotel beds and immediately dashed downtown to try and ferret out the 007-production
company.

The quartet of coeds, all
attractive in their way, all attention-getters, actually ended up getting their
faces painted by studio makeup artists to resemble ebony and ivory sugar
skulls.

They’d been fitted with tight
little black dresses illustrated with white paint to evoke skeletal rib cages
and backbones. Their arms — from bared shoulders to bronzed fingertips — were
covered with white paint to also resemble bones.

They’d been handed waivers
for their signatures to clear the way for potential onscreen cameos come the
film’s planned autumn release.

About that onscreen film potential: Addie is blond
and very “California Girl” and so
probably a definite dark horse in any stakes to escape the cutting room floor.

Bree is black and Talia is Asian:
again, two extreme long-shots for on-screen face time in a vignette calculated
to evoke spooky old superstitious Meh-hee-co
and a decidedly Mexican take on death.

But Jenna—a Miami native,
dark-haired, dark-eyed and decidedly cinnamon-skinned—is sufficiently latina-esque to maybe make the grade,
particularly with all the skull face paint she still sports.

Normally, her crazy makeup
would be an attention-getter in a club like this one, but the bar is close-by
the filming site and so most of the other patrons are similarly painted-and tarted-up:
a riot of dancing, top-hat wearing skeletons and their spooky bone brides.

Hell, a few Cosplay sorts
actually arrived at the filming site in over-the-top costumes of their own
design: highly-stylized Baron Samedis and pale-faced, hollow-eyed Emiliano
Zapata zombies proliferate in the club. Some of their war paint is starting to streak
with their trailing sweat as the club grows closer, muggier.

There are myriad T-shirts
with slogans or maybe even proverbs if Addie’s Spanish is to be trusted on such
things:

Hay más tiempo que vida

Se me subió el muerto

and

Te asustas del metro y te coijas con la mortaja.

Nearly given a migraine by
the club’s flashing, strobing lights and a newish Selina Gomez song blasting in
her ears, Jenna again rues agreeing to this crazy and impulsive road trip.

They’d never even gotten a glimpse of Daniel Craig.

Some crew member with a
bullhorn had given the cluster of extras some down-and-dirty background on the
Day of the Dead ceremony and its meaning, first in Spanish, then in English:

“Tradition says we all die
three deaths,” he called out through the speakers. “One is the actual death of
our body. The second death comes as we are lowered into the grave forever. The
third and final death comes when there is nobody left alive who remembers us.
In knowing that, and in understanding and embracing death in its three stages,
we lose our fear of the darkness.”

Even with their painted faces
— the four girls are dressed for a Day of the Dead parade after all, not clubbing and trawling for guys — they
are still perceived targets of
opportunity for local lotharios who are decidedly not as easy to shake off or
brush aside as guys usually are back home.

The little black dresses
hugging shapely thighs and the girls’ do-me heels aren’t helping matters. Yes,
those spiked heels also make dancing a threat for serious ankle injury. There’s
only one word for them:

Killer.

And for too many of these
guys in the bar, No, or non, seems to be misconstrued as a
shorthand version of encouragement, ala:

Try harder, hot-stuff. Keep coming, hombre. Don’t stop just
because I say I want you to. Because what I really
want is to be taken. I want it and I
want it hard.

Emphatically, Jenna does not want to be taken, or really even simply
talked to by any strangers tonight.

She thinks again of her
fiancé, Brandon; again fingers the strange, impractical but well-meaning
medallion he bought her a year or so ago during a campus scare regarding a
potential serial rapist.

Waves of guilt for rebelling
against him about this trip freshly take hold.

Brandon had reminded her of the
necklace that had spent the past several months dwelling in a drawer once the apparent rape
threat at school subsided.

He begged Jenna to wear it on
this trip when he grudgingly relented about her taking up Addie’s offer, at
last realizing he couldn’t talk his prospective wife out of this whimsical and
whim-driven, across-the-border run with her theater major girlfriends.

The piece of jewelry is
rather clunky, bronze-hued medallion, shaped like an egg and about the same
size. It's emblazoned with a stylized Chinese dragon with emerald eyes.

But the “egg” is fractured: a stylized crack defaces its lower third—a deep scar runs
jaggedly along its width, edge-to-edge.

In truth, the medallion is a
knife necklace: The bottom of the medallion pulls free at the crack, its base serving
as the stingy “hilt” of a hidden, two-inch long, sharply pointed and stainless
steel blade that might be driven into an eye or the forehead of an attacker at
close range — maybe even into a major artery if a victim knows where to find
one of those.

At best, it’s a last chance
bid at escape, as the ads rather disarmingly and frighteningly acknowledged
when she looked them up online after being gifted the ugly thing by Brandon all
those months ago.

Lecturing against her Mexican
trip, Brandon said, “I’ve got family in Texas and they don’t even cross the border anymore, Jen. Juarez is the murder
capital of the world and Mexico City isn’t much better. The cartels or even
just the wannabes kidnap any American they can lay hands on and ransom them for
pennies on the dollar. Sometimes after cutting
off fingers and sending bloody phone photos for proof of life. I’m not making
this up, Jen. Are your parents really on board with this trip? I ask because I
think it’s fucking crazy.”

Her parents were not on board; they didn’t even know she’d
decided to go.

The trip was nearly free and
her passport seemed so pathetically blank.

And it was a chance to maybe
get a résumé point by making an appearance in a blockbuster film.

This was a great and harmless
opportunity, or so she’d convinced herself.

How the hell could she say
no?

And countering Brandon’s
gloom and doom, Addie insisted to Jenna and the others that Mexico City was a
kind of second home, one she visited three or four times a year,
sometimes very much alone, courtesy of more of Daddy’s geometrically accruing
airline points.

There’s nothing to be scared about, Addie had argued. Screw the newspapers and the cable news
channels — especially FOX: They just stir shit up and stoke paranoia to drive
ratings, that’s all.

But in deference to Brandon,
Jenna slipped the knife necklace in her carry-on and crossed her fingers,
banking the metal-on-metal construction would somehow succeed in obscuring its
true nature from scans and wouldn’t get her in trouble with wage-slave TSA
agents.

Indeed: Jenna sailed through airport inspection without a second glance.

In that moment of safe
passage, she felt a mixture of relief and
quiet terror at the thought of what other
things the security agents might be letting slip through on the bodies or in the bags of other fellow
travelers along with her absurd little knife that was significantly shorter
than her pinky finger.

(Really, what could it really do in a pinch? Bringing
it had surely been another stupid risk, another mistake in judgment.)

But Brandon had been so adamant: “Jenna, it’s fucking Mexico.
It’s a bloodbath down there, now, but not like you’d know. Have you read how many dead women they’ve found in the
deserts down there over the last few years? We’re talkin’ hundreds, at least.”

So now the silly necklace hangs around her dewy neck, its mystery metal clinging to the damp flesh between her full but pert breasts, its bulk somewhat obscured by its resting place under the
little black dress and the center fastener of Jenna's redundant push-up bra.

Addie suddenly, drunkenly
stumbles up to Jen. She drunkenly taps glasses. Addie’s been
dancing with practically every guy who’s hit on her and she’s worked up quite
the glistening lather. Her painted face is deeply streaked, looking like a
luckless clown caught in a cloudburst.

She says tartly and loudly to
Jenna, “So, everyone wants to head
back to the hotel, like, pretty much, now!
Don’t worry about wrecking it for me if you’re not on my side. Bitches have
already pretty much decided and they somehow have more actual money than me, now!”

Addie hefts her glass. She practically
yells, “Shouldn’t have ordered jumbo! Bitch who made my drink used too much
ice and mixer and went light on the good stuff! That always sucks, right?” She
sips, makes a face, laments, “It’s more like Gatorade or some lemon water than
a Margarita!”

Jenna nods slowly, reading
her friend’s lips more than really hearing her words: despite all the yelling, those
are mostly buried under the deafening beat from the club’s speakers.

“Right,” Jenna said. Expecting the usual fidgety line at the lady’s room,
she says, “Gotta hit the restroom real fast, then we can go. Just give me,
like, five minutes, yeah?” She spreads the fingers on her right hand to telegraph
the time.

Dazedly, still working her
unsatisfactory drink with hollowed cheeks as she sucks at the straw, Addie waves
a hand and drifts off again, hand-in-hand with some scrawny dude with a tattooed
neck.

Jenna isn’t sure her friend
has heard or even grasped the message she’s shot her before she stumbles off
with her repeat dance partner.

Oh well: Club mixes always tended to go on and on and then on some
more, anyway, right?

There should be plenty of time, she figures.

Putting down her clunky goblet, Jenna weaves her way to the restroom. As she queasily makes that uneasy
passage, she lashes at herself: That second
one was definitely one too many: Idiot! You’re drunk!

She needs some comfort food.

And buckets of black coffee.

Oh, and water and some
aspirin to stave off the surely looming hangover.

Even with all that, Jenna’s
starting to envision this lousy evening likely ending in her hugging the
stained plumbing in their dumpy hotel room.

That is if the other girls aren’t in line for the same, hogging the toilet bowl ahead
of her.

She thinks again about how Brandon would be so disappointed if he was here to
witness Jenna being wasted like this.

***

Jenna returns from the
restroom to find the table her friends had staked out and taken turns holding
onto is now occupied by a couple of couples.

Strangers, that is to say.

That’s a mild gut punch, of
course.

But knowing they were soon
leaving, and having lost their table’s trustiest anchor — that would be the never-dancing
Jenna — perhaps her friends have simply surrendered the table to this new
party.

Jenna shakily climbs up a
flight of stairs to get a better look at the dance floor from above. Again, sees
none of her friends down there, shaking it a last time.

This is precisely the point
where Jenna begins to worry, just a little.

She heads back down to the
lower level and quickly walks the club in the round; checks around the
entrance. She doesn’t catch a glimpse of her three friends.

With a shaking hand, Jenna
pulls out her smart phone for the first time since hitting Mexico and realizes it isn’t working south of the border.

A wicked epiphany: No international phone plan in place. Of
course.God!

Jenna’s really sweating now; she feels the damp prickle under her arms and a tickle at the base of her spine.She
takes a deep calming, cleansing breath, then orbits the club again.

But again, it is all for nada: that four-letter word pretty much
constitutes Jenna’s only claim to any Spanish outside adios.

Addie has been their
Spanish-speaking lifeline this trip—the only Spanish speaker in their sleek quartet.

Yes, no sign of a familiar
face other than this dude who’s been eyeing Jenna all night. The stranger is
latino, about six-feet tall. Slender, and sporting no visible tats.

He’s not unattractive. But so what?

She is so not in the market for anything like him, not at all.

That thought prompts another
one: Jenna glances at the diamond on her left ring finger; realizes it’s a
prime target for theft. She thinks about slipping it off and hiding it in her
pocket but fears she’ll lose it, somehow.

As a compromise, she twists her
engagement ring around, the stone cutting into her palm as she clenches fists.

Cursing again, she stalks
back to the bar. She negotiates in pidgin Spanish-English for black coffee in a
travel cup, fairly sure she’s being grossly over-charged—another result of
suddenly being a stranger in a strange land with no command of the lingo; a target
of opportunity…again.

Goddamn Addie and the other bitches for abandoning her, anyway.

How the hell could they do
that?

Jenna takes a too deep drink
of the near-scalding black coffee. She slightly burns the roof of her mouth in
the process. Jenna consoles herself the resulting pain is a way to stoke badly needed
focus.

She wanders out of the
sweltering club into the chilly Mexico City night.

The crescent moon seems to
sneer as she waves and calls for cabs, maddeningly watching them roll past or
claimed by snickering native speakers who flip her the bird as they commandeer
the latest taxi she’s stopped.

Two or three times, she hears
a dude who’s stolen one of those cabs declare her a gringa puta.

Okay, so along with nada and adios, Jenna realizes she knows some Spanish profanity, too.

A male
voice, slightly Latin-inflected, surprises her:

“Hey, let me help!”

She knows who he will be
before she turns to take him in. She’s right, of course: the dude from the club
who’d given her the eye all night.

“You’re American,” he says. A
smile and a little shrug. “The accent’s a giveaway. Let me do this?”

Not waiting for her approval,
he whistles sharply, pointing at an approaching cab, then points at the exact
spot on the curb where he expects the driver to stop.

Amazingly, the cab driver does
that very thing.

Truly grateful, Jenna said,
“Thanks so much!”

“De nada. I mean, it’s nothing,” the stranger says, smiling.

He wears a sports coat over a
black T-shirt. The latter is emblazoned with an illustration of Emiliano Zapata
and reads, “It is better to live on your feet than to die on your knees!”

After the taxi driver lowers
his front passenger’s side window, Jenna gives him her destination, trying to
do so quietly so maybe the young guy by her side won’t hear. The driver nods.She
smiles and opens the rear curbside door, sliding in.

Too her horror, her
benefactor squeezes in right behind her.

He grins, says, “Cabs aren’t
that easy to get at this hour, and in this neighborhood? We can split the fare…okay?”

Jenna says unconvincingly, “Sure.”

***

As they slide off the curb,
the cab driver flicks at his armrest console and the doors lock. Almost in the
same motion, her backseat companion scoops from the floor an aerosol can of
engine starter.

Jenna was handed-down her
dad’s beater car in the early going as a newbie driver.

Starter spray had been
mission critical keeping the old car going in her high school driving months. Jenna also knows the stuff in the spray can is mostly ether, and she knows what else
that substance can do if she breathes it in: knows it’s do-it-yourself anesthetic.
Date-rape drug in a can.

Even as she grasps all that,
the man sprays some of the stuff into a black handkerchief, then forces the rag
over Jenna’s nose and mouth. He simultaneously pinches her arm, making her cry
out, then suck air.

Her last thought as she
convulsively takes the stuff into her lungs:

The bastards are in this
together, this stranger and his driver.

They mean to rape me—probably
for starters.

Of at least that much, Jenna is certain.

Given her solitude as a lone
tourist, and their intended crime, she figures they also mean to kill her.

Those are Jenna’s last
thoughts as the ether drags her under.

***

She comes to gagging, flat on
her back on some piece of hard ground and pinned under the man with the Zapata T-shirt.

Her little black dress and
bra have been forced up over her breasts. Her underwear's been
stripped off, wadded up and jammed into her mouth as a DIY gag.

The stranger is trying to
force his way into her, one hand down there to guide himself, his other holding
her wrists together, just above her head.

Somewhere, roughly
between her attacker’s chin and right ear lobe, is an embarrassment of riches of
life-threatening targets: interior and exterior carotid arteries and jugular
veins.

His knees now
between hers, this stranger named Desi belligerently leverages Jenna’s trembling
legs outward, spreading them farther apart.

Desperately, Jenna
puts left shoulder to the thrust, driving the small blade into the right side of Desi’s
throat.

She savagely twists
and drags the stunted blade up and down, then she twists left and right, furiously
working the steel around inside his neck, striving to do the utmost and
bloodiest destruction before he can react.

She’s rewarded with
a warm and pulsing spray against her cheek, then a desperate and gurgling plea:
“Miguel, help me, por favor!Mia madre!Puta cut me! Puta
cut me bad!”

Somehow, Jenna grasps
the gist: the driver’s gun is still back in the taxi.

The driver’s pants are
already down around his ankles, anticipating his turn with Jenna. He quickly
pulls them up, snaps his jeans closed, then runs to fetch his gun, holding up
his unbelted jeans with one hand.

Jenna spits out her
underwear. She struggles to push aside the half-naked man bleeding to death and
still sprawled atop her.

There's so much
blood sprayed over and pooled beneath them Jenna can only guess Desi is bleeding out fast.

As she forces her
arms under his body to roll him off, Jenna feels something hard just under his
left armpit. A holstered gun.

Jenna tugs it free, struggles to her feet, then begins to fire, not really aiming. She takes frantic shots at the open driver’s side door
of the taxi cab and its windshield, concentrating fire in the vicinity of the
steering wheel.

Maybe there's a soft cry of pain from the taxi driver between rapid-fire shots, but
it could have been something else.

She keeps tugging on
the trigger, finally dry firing until the mechanism seizes.

More time passes—much
more than it reasonably should take a live, armed man to return fire or come to
finish her off.

So Jenna convinces herself the second man must also be dead or
dying. His legs are visible behind the cab’s bullet-hole-riddled door. He looks
a little like he might be praying.

Numbly, Jenna wipes blood from herself with
her attacker’s discarded pants, then tugs down her bra and blood-stained dress.
She shakily steps into and then pulls up her panties, still damp with her saliva.

Her ruined medallion
lays on the floor of what she now sees is some underground parking garage. She
kicks the chain and bloodstained knife necklace down a sewer grate.

Carefully, she
approaches the cab.Its driver is sprawled partly across the front seat,
slumped over in another pool of blood. His cell phone lays on the dash. She
could use that phone to call for police, or maybe just a taxi, but then Jenna
realizes it might also be traced to its owner and linked back to his
body at this bloody crime scene.

Crime scene.

Blood.

Bodies.

Jenna looks around
again.

There is no other word for her now than the obvious one:

Killer.

Sliding into shock, yet somehow still coldly weighing options, Jenna checks herself out
in the cab’s rearview mirror. She swipes a little spot of blood from her white face painted chin.

Other than looking a
bit drunk or hung-over, there’s not much to show for what’s she been through.
Blessedly, little black party dresses don’t show much or really any
blood in low light.

Decided, she snatches
up the dead driver’s phone. She fiddles around and gets a location for herself
with its GPS. She uses the phone and the new knowledge of her location to call Addie’s
cell. She’ll have the selfish, deserting bitch come in another cab to
fetch Jenna—that's the start of her plan.

Thinking more of
strange cab drivers, Jenna goes around to the other side of the cab and reaches
through the open window, snatching up her purse and the driver’s gun.

The automatic goes
into her purse for future protection. She’ll dump it somewhere in or
nearby the hotel on their way to the airport, she decides.

Yes, that'll be the next step in her plan:

A cab, a quick and hot
shower before the girls can see all the blood on her dress that she’ll also
dump in some trashcan along the way, then a quick border crossing home before the
Mexican cops can get their investigative shit together.

This garage was
clearly chosen for weekend privacy, she reasons.

This seems to have been a kind of thing
between the dead man in the Zapata T-shirt and the taxi driver.

Chances are, she tells herself, their bodies won’t be found before Monday morning.

This next thought, or memory, really, comes seemingly unbidden:

It is better to travel hopefully, than to
arrive.

Another piece of travel wisdom, this one glimpsed
on a T-shirt back home, next ambushes Jenna:

Mexico! Come on vacation, leave on probation!

***

Out on the street,
the cooling night air swiftly begins to dry damp clothes and scanty underthings.

Jenna arranges her
pick up with a drunken but apologetic Addie. After she breaks their connection, Jenna decimates the dead taxi
driver’s phone with a spiked heel and deposits its remains down a storm water
drain.

She thinks about how
hard it’s going to be not to tear into Addie and the other two for
abandoning her as they did.

Nothing will ever be
the same between Jenna and her friends, not after the result of their callous carelessness in
running off without her.

Certainly nothing is
ever going to be the same for Jenna: not having to shoulder the terrible, bloody
secret she has already decided must remain forever her own.

Across the street
there’s a billboard welcoming the James Bond film crew to Mexico City. A
grinning sugar skull adorned with a glittering “007” across its gaudy forehead stares
down at Jenna and the otherwise empty street.

Come November, Brandon’s
going to insist on seeing that damned film, she knows, hoping for a fleeting glimpse of his life's love—sleek
Jenna, pretty death personified.

“Mexico: Beyond your
dreams, but within your reach. Live it to believe it!"

We all die three deaths, the man with the
bullhorn called out to a crowd of skeletons what seems a lifetime ago.

The memory of the
men she's killed will stay with her always. And, so, always, there will linger the guilt of what
she's done to them tonight—certainly that's so if all the ancient Mexican folklore is right.

Her victims’ ghosts
will haunt her for all her life.

Legs trembling,
stomach heaving, Jenna abruptly falls to her knees on the sidewalk and is violently ill.

A drunken vagrant sees the
lone girl with her painted face there on knee.

The homeless man is uncertain
whether the girl is also drunk or maybe instead praying. The stranger shrugs
and stumbles on, for the first time realizing how both drink and prayer bring you to your knees.

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THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH

The climax of the Hector Lassiter series, coming November 2016 from Betimes Books. "With THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH, Craig McDonald has crafted a remarkable coda to the series."—Steven Powell, author of JAMES ELLROY: DEMON DOG OF CRIME FICTION Get your copy here https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N0D4UFX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edgar®/Anthony/Macavity/Gumshoe/Crimespree nominated novelist of ONE TRUE SENTENCE, FOREVER'S JUST PRETEND, TOROS & TORSOS, THE GREAT PRETENDER, ROLL THE CREDITS, THE RUNNING KIND, HEAD GAMES, PRINT THE LEGEND, DEATH IN THE FACE, THREE CHORDS & THE TRUTH, EL GAVILAN, PARTS UNKNOWN, CARNIVAL NOIR, CABAL and ANGELS OF DARKNESS. Nonfiction titles include ART IN THE BLOOD and ROGUE MALES: CONVERSATIONS & CONFRONTATIONS ABOUT THE WRITING LIFE.

TOROS & TORSOS (HECTOR LASSITER SERIES #3)

THE GREAT PRETENDER (HECTOR LASSITER SERIES #4)

Hector Lassiter Series: #2 Bestseller, Amazon.com.au! "McDonald cagily splits up the action, with Welles in full enfant terrible mode in the first half of the book—much of the story unfolds on the night of the infamous War of the Worlds broadcast in 1938—while the second takes place in the late 1940s as the filmmaker's star is already burning out."—Vince Keenan, author of DOWN THE HATCH